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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-11
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJx7_JpxlxA
There's never been a greater need for smart and thoughtful leaders. Different decisions don't stand a chance in these times of polarization, alternative facts and fake news. But there is a solution to this problem, and it lies in a type of intelligence called inclusive intelligence, which is formed through diversity. It turns out that diversity actually makes you smarter. Diversity has been a defining element of my entire
life. I had a transformative experience when I was five years old, living in the deep south with my family during the darkest days of the civil rights movement. My mother took my sisters and I along with her one day as she went on her visiting nurse duties, giving shots to poor families throughout the community. I remember pulling up in front of what could only be described
as a shack in the middle of a field. And watching as several black children ran out to greet us, they took us inside and we sat down to play with their only toy, which was a board game in pristine condition. That experience rocked me to my core, but it wasn't until later when I was in school and learned about the history of our country. I put
two and two together and figured out that what I was looking at that day was the vestiges of slavery. That turned my soul inside out. I decided to go to law school and my first job after law school was as a federal civil rights prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. It was there that I prosecuted hate crimes, police brutality, and I even had a slavery
case. Here I left the Department of Justice, I became deeply passionate about advocating for diversity and teaching people about this new paradigm called inclusion, which is necessary to unlock all of the benefits of diversity. And those benefits are tremendous. You may not realize this, but researchers have discovered that diverse teams of people outperform homogenous groups. They are more innovative, more productive, and companies with greater diversity
are more profitable. Now when I share this with you, you probably think and rightly so that when you bring people together from different social identities and backgrounds, they'll have new and different information and perspectives to share with the group. And if those are incorporated into the groups work, then that could lead to these findings that diverse teams outperform homogenous groups. But it's more than that. Researchers
have discovered a second hidden reason why diverse teams of people outperform homogenous groups. In a research study published in 2006, the researchers enlisted the help of nearly 200 people who had shown up for jury duty at the local courthouse. And because they were trying to find out whether race made a difference in decision-making groups, they divided everyone up into mock jury panels, half of which were
diverse, meaning they consisted of both black and white people. The other half of the jury panels were homogenous, consisting of all white people. They showed everyone a half an hour court TV case involving a criminal matter and then put them into deliberation rooms, videotaping their conversations so that the researchers could go back frame by frame and count instances of behavior to compare the two groups. And
what they found was, yes, in fact, the diverse jury panels outperformed the homogenous jury panels, but it was more because they were working harder cognitively than the all white jury panels which fell into sort of a groupthink mentality and they got a little bit lazy in their processing of the information. So you can see from this screen capture, from the study, the differences in performance between
the two groups. First of all, notice that the diverse jury panels deliberated longer. They spent 30% more time talking about the facts of the case. They actually talked about more of the facts in the case than the all white jury panels. They made fewer mistakes with respect to the evidence, they made fewer, uncorrected, inaccurate statements, and they cited more of the missing evidence that they would
have liked to have seen presented in the case. Now, as a former federal civil rights prosecutor, this is really disturbing to think that just the racial makeup of the group could result in these kinds of disparities in performance. If you were the criminal defendant in this case, which jury panel would you rather have decide your fate? So the question is how smart are you? That's your
chair in the middle, the red chair. Who's sitting in the chairs around you? Who are you putting in those chairs? If it's a very homogenous group, people who are quite a bit like you in terms of social identities and backgrounds and perspectives, you're not doing yourself any favors. In fact, you've created an echo chamber. If you want to build your own inclusive intelligence, you'll want to
put different people in those chairs, people who are going to challenge your thinking and make you think harder and think smarter. Another way to build your inclusive intelligence is to look into your blind spots. Each of us has multiple intersecting identities, many of which are listed on the screen. Some of those identities, though, are a little bit more important than others. One of those identities that's
important to me is my occupation. And with respect to those important identities, they inform and form our worldview. We're much more apt to pay attention to information that has to do with an important identity, which for me is my occupation. So I'm paying more attention to information that impacts this identity, pulling it through and factoring it into my thinking more readily than I am with respect
to some other identities. For example, an identity that I don't think about at all during my day is my race. As a white person in our society, I don't think about being white. I don't think about my race. And so what that means is, instead of it being a lens that informs my thinking, it's back here in my blind spot, I'm not attending to this identity.
I'm not seeing through that lens necessarily. And the point of this is that when you've got blind spots, you can make mistakes in your thinking. And that's what happened to the American Red Cross last year when it sent out its swim safety poster, which was posted at swimming pools all across the country. A woman in Colorado took a very close look at this poster and noticed
that every child of color depicted in the poster was doing something naughty and breaking the rules. Whereas every white child in the poster was playing by the rules and being cool. Now I don't think for a second that the American Red Cross did this intentionally or on purpose. In fact, it turns out that all of the executives at the American Red Cross are white. And I
believe like me, they have race back here in their blind spot. And they just didn't see what this poster depicted. Another example involves the regional transportation district in Denver, Colorado. A couple of years ago, there was an election to the board of directors. And the two new board members elected that year were people with disabilities, including the woman in the photograph who has visual impairments. Unfortunately,
the ongoing board members at RTD and the staff planned a board bonding day that included a trip to the go-cart race track. Immediately, these two brand new people were standing on the sidelines as everyone else participated and they were excluded. Again, I don't believe for a minute that that was done intentionally. In fact, I believe that the planning committee had disability back here in their blind
spot. They just weren't attending to it. Clearly, if anyone had had this lens, front and center, a different decision would have been made. Now you don't need to have a disability in order to have this lens up for yourself, right? You can pull these blind spots forward and that's going to help you develop your inclusive intelligence. And that's what my husband's been doing. He's decided that
gender is an identity that he just doesn't think about on a daily basis. It's just not an important identity. So he's been practicing pulling that lens forward and looking through it more deliberately and intentionally. And he's been having some big, ah-ha moments as a result. In fact, he was at a big meeting where everyone was divided up into smaller discussion groups. And he went across the
room to join a circle of people that he had been randomly assigned to, when a female staffer walked up to the group and asked the woman in the group to take the notes. Because he had this lens up, he recognized that gender micro-eniquity for the first time in his life. As of course, when women are asked to do what's called the housework of work, it puts
them in a one-down position. She can't participate in the conversation at the same level as everyone else while she's also trying to take the notes. And they may not view her as their equal in the conversation, even if it's only unconsciously, because she's attending to this ministerial or secretarial duty. But because he was pulling this lens forward, he saw this inequity. And now he's got a
new plan. He'll volunteer to take the notes. Or at the very least, make sure that this task is shared more equitably so that it doesn't always fall to the woman. So the question is, what will you do to build your inclusive intelligence so that you make smarter, better decisions? One thing that you can do is pull these blind spots forward and look through these lenses. That
will help you make smarter decisions. Also surrounding yourself with people who are different from you, they'll bring new and different information to your thinking, and they'll force you out of your comfort zone and make you think harder and work smarter. Because the challenges that we're facing aren't getting any easier, they're becoming more and more complex. Will you be blindsided by those difficult problems or will you
